The Smart Grid
The analog electric grid is the world’s largest machine system. Virtually every industry in the United States has been modernized minus the utility industry. The grid’s architecture has changed little since it was first deployed in the late 1800s. Very few reliability improvements have been made. Monitoring equipment for predictive maintenance or security purposes requires dedicated sensors and dedicated communications lines. Determining the source of equipment failures often involves waiting for customers to call in and report outages. Costly truck rolls to individual locations do meter reading and service changes are required.
For the last ten years, energy demand has been increasing at double the rate of population increase, increasing the current environmental impact from the generation itself and the pressure to build new generating capacity to serve peak demand. As more costly generation facilities are used to meet higher periodic demand, utilities pay much more for power at peak times but cannot communicate this variable pricing to most consumers to affect use patterns. Regulators and utilities want to incent consumers to both conserve and shift usage away from periods of peak demand but lack the tools to do so.
The Ambient Smart Grid® communications platform, overlaid on the medium-voltage and low-voltage segments of the power distribution systems, brings the electrical power distribution grid to digital modernization with high-speed data. While this enables electric utilities to compete with cable and telecom companies to provide consumer broadband Internet service, a more important function, and one with often greater direct economic return, is to use this technology to solve some of the problems electric utilities and their customers face.
The combination of an IP-based connection at any point on the distribution network, coupled with a variety of sensing and control devices, is known as a “smart grid.” A variety of applications allows the smart grid to provide immediate operational and economic benefits for the grid operator, its users, and society as a whole. The sensing and intelligence built into the Ambient Smart Grid® network equipment gives operators real-time system status and usage information allowing for load balancing. Smart meters are individually addressed to reduce labor requirements through remote reading and service changes. The two-way communications link to each customer, and to each node on the network, allows utility managers to implement many cost savings, energy efficiencies and operational improvements that have previously been uneconomical such as the delivery of real-time pricing, enabling consumers to make intelligent consumption decisions to reduce loads during peak demand periods.The Ambient Smart Grid® communications platform allows for a wide range of services, applications, and solutions including:
Operational Cost Benefits
The Ambient Smart Grid® communications platform can help utilities to minimize their non-repair, non-revenue labor costs. Services that are now performed by truck rolls to individual locations can be performed remotely. Such tasks include automated metering initiatives (AMI) and remote re-connect and disconnect.
Grid Management
Operators of an Ambient Smart Grid® can monitor and communicate with their equipment in real-time, not only at sub-stations but at any point on the distribution network without additional equipment to the Ambient system. This visibility into the electrical grid provides enhanced real-time status reporting and allows for increasing grid efficiency and reliability, more precise preventative maintenance, and ultimately less system downtime. The ability to communicate with each node, even during system outages, enables the following applications: remote outage detection and restoration confirmation, enhanced real-time system status, and improved load profiling.
Enhanced Security
In addition to the ensuring operational performance, utilities must monitor and provide physical security for a large distributed infrastructure. In certain locations, underground distribution tunnels for example, communications with repair crews becomes difficult or impossible. The Ambient Smart Grid® can provide solutions such as communications at any point on the power distribution network and substation monitoring of utility substations.
Capacity Management
The smart grid enables utilities and consumers, both individually and in concert, to intelligently limit the usage of power, thus minimizing peak demand and the need for additional generating and distribution infrastructure. The presence of a constant high-speed two-way data path to each customer removes the limitations of traditional time of day peak load pricing and allows a wide range of advanced interactive use management techniques such as real-time pricing, intelligent demand side management and direct load control systems.
Public and Industrial Services
The same Ambient Smart Grid® network that fulfills the utility’s operating needs is also available to government and industry. The ability to access an economical high-speed always-on data network at any point on the electrical grid again enhances existing applications and enables new ones. Public and industrial applications are expected to grow rapidly as smart grid networks are deployed and currently include traditional remote monitoring applications, video security surveillance, industrial process monitoring and real-time traffic monitoring.
Smart grid applications enabled by a robust two-way communications network such as the Ambient Smart Grid® has the potential to modernize our electrical grid via smart grid applications.